Track Breakdown

Just for fun, I've written some notes about each interesting section of the song.

0:00 - 0:12 "Intro" theme

The first thing you hear is the chords of the Carvin Bolt+ "Blueshifter", recorded direct through the Line6 POD amp simulator, a nice crunchy amplifer setting.

I recorded the guitar twice, the two tracks panned hard left and right, with some aggressive EQ notches applied to each track at different frequencies, adding some subtle differences to each side of the stereo spread. Additionally, I've made a severe roll-off on anything under 200Hz, removing most of the bass frequencies from the guitar.

Accompanying the guitar is XLN Addictive drums (performed using the SPD-20 8-pad controller) and the Carvin BK5 bass, recorded through a different patch on the Line6 POD.

In the past I've had trouble getting a good bass sound - I've tried the POD before and failed; and I've tried virtual effects like Guitar Rig, and Amplitude, but this time, something clicked in a good way, and the POD is victorious with a patch with some drive and mid-frequency scooping, and a lot of treble for grit.

The bass sounds just great on its own, but in the mix I applied a couple of tricks:

I applied some EQ roll-off at frequencies above 2 kHz because there's other instruments that need that frequency space. There's still sufficient volume on the remaining signal that you can hear the grit and squeak and pop from the bass, but it is pulled down so as to not get in the way of the guitar.

Anything below 100 Hz got -12db to free up the drums.

Finally, I unabashedly cut the track into segments and applied aggressive volume enveloping so that the note transitions are staccato and crisp, muting things like muffled string vibration, bass resonance, etc. When the bass it supposed to be quiet, its now dead quiet. Without this inter-note muting, although you don't hear the extra fluff directly, it can muffle up the mix. You can sure notice the difference when its removed.

The second time through the chord sequence, we're joined by a lead guitar (the Gibson L6-S), plus a mixture of "Hammond Organ" - the Roland VK8 - and "Trumpet Synth", as realized by a nice "GX-1"- type sound on the CS-80v virtual instrument from Arturia. (This combined Hammond+GX1 sound is, of course, a total steal/homage to Keith Emerson's tone palette from '77.)

The organ and synth together give a nice statement of the main theme. Let's make something clear from the get-go:

It's often that composers hear a riff or chord sequence that sounds great, and only later on do they realize they've ripped it off some other famous song or composition by another artist. Sometimes it's tolerable, and sometimes not. Shortly after Walter and I jammed around and came up with this set of chords, we thought we'd lifted it from Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Rage Hard" from their excellent sophomore album "Liverpool", but now I think a more direct influence would be the iconic phrase from "Who Are You" by The Who.

Earlier versions of the composition had this sequence in 4/4 time signature, but I think it works better in 7/8. This also helps reduce the similarity with the inspirational sources.

Either way, I'm comfortable with it.

0:25 - 0:33 "Pre-verse"

In the pre-verse section, we hear a gentle minimoog-style repetitive synth motif - that's a patch on the Roland Fantom keyboard, "Soaring Lead" or similar.

0:33 - 0:47 "Verse 1"

The arpeggiated ostinato guitar behind the verses and choruses is primarily the Carvin DC127, nick-named "Woody". I'm using the piezo pickup which yields a nice, "pseudo-acoustic" sound but it is really its own thing. Panned over on the other side, at low volumne, the same notes are duplicated by the Bolt+, to add a little gritty complexity to the sound.

For extra nerd points, realise that the verse chord sequence is actually the same chord sequence as the verses in "Into the Shade", only backwards.

Vocal-wise, the verses are a single take, panned center. I also made a duplicate of the verse vocal track, and applied a "Guitar Amp Distortion" FX plugin to it and reduced the volume, so what you hear in each verse is the natural tone plus just a hint of the distorted version, giving the verses a slight gritty edge.

0:47 - 0:53 "the B-C pause"

The primary players in this sweet 4/4 - 7/8 motif are the "Hammond" and the "trumpet synth".

The Dimension Pro VST synth adds some strings in the upper registers for some extra sustaining sweetness.

The B note is reinforced with a virtual stomp on the "Moog Taurus pedals" to really punch out that low note.

The Moog Taurus pedal bass synth was a mainstay of 70's prog bands - particularly Rush, Yes and Genesis - and it is notable for being felt rather than heard. It has a very distinctive "sound" and can only be emulated, not replaced. (It has to sound right, not any bass synth note will do.) I am very grateful to Antti's re-creation of the Taurus synth in VST form, which I am using here.

0:53 - 1:08 "Chorus"

And on the subject of ripping off other artist's music, the guitar arpeggios here in the chorus are yeah-kinda-sorta-like Bryan Adam's "Run To You" but I swear I didn't notice until much later.

For the chorus vocals I panned two takes 25% left and right for a "double-tracked" sound.

I have duplicated certain select phrases from the chorus, and placed them into a separate track, using the Pentagon I virtual synth as an FX plugin to get the vocoder effect (the technique is explained here). I've used a custom saw wave patch for this, one with a wide frequency range that works well with the vocoder.

1:20 - 1:34 "Verse 2"

Here I lower the guitar arpeggios by 3 db and bring in some strings, courtesy of the Dimension Pro VST from Cakewalk. This multi-timbral synth allows patches to have multiple instruments, each responding to separate MIDI channel. I've set up a four part patch with Violin 1, 2, Viola and Cello parts, which I then orchestrate with four independent MIDI tracks in SONAR, recorded in separate takes. This gets a nice result - you can hear each "voice" of the string section playing their own dedicated melody, rather than just block chords - a much more realistic effect.

I particularly like the drum-bass shuffle/harmonic at 1:26 behind "shouldn't have tried".

1:41 - 2:22 "A-D-A Floating Ambiance"

Here, I'm trying to evoke the sensation of floating underwater, peacefully, with the bright sun flickering down through the gentle undulations of the ocean surface.

Six or seven tracks of heavily delayed/reverberated guitar are combined into a wash of sound. I recorded the guitar years ago when I still had the Carvin TL60, running the piezo pickup through my old Digitech GSP 21 effect unit. It may be an rather antiquated device, but it has a really nice reverberation algorithm inside it.

At 2:02 we move from A to D and our little friend the Fantom monosynth leaf comes in with a reprise of the "Strange But True" motif, followed by somebody stepping on the Taurus' D pedal again. Now back to A, leading up to...

2:22 - 3:10 "Guitar Solo"

With the mix stripped back to Drums, Bass, and 'Hammond" backing up the lead guitar, the Carvin Bolt+ takes off on a solo that is tons of fun to play. This is actually the only lead guitar part performed on the Bolt+. Everything else is the Gibson L6-S, but I needed the Floyd tremelo on the Bolt+ for the swoops and dives of the Solo.

You can hear the "hard-tailed" Gibson come in at 2:31 with a high counterpoint melody.

At 2:53, the string section joins in for some high sustained notes, followed closely by chiming chords from the DC127, as the solo winds up.

3:22 - 3:43 Verse 3 / BC pause

At 3:42 there's a deliberate deviation from script as the rhythm guitar plays on alternating beats, giving an automatic hard left-right panning effect.

4:12 - 4:37 The big finish

A slight variation on the opening theme, in A then back to D. At 4:36 there's a sudden and deliberate modulation from D to E, so the song finishes up, ready to segue seemlessly into the next track, "Strange Finale".

I did it for technical reasons, but musically, I really like the last minute change. If the rest of the song is proclaiming, "something's gotta give", then this is the shifting of the foundations.

4:37 - 5:26 "Outro"

I love the Taurus pedal note at 4:40. The song closes out with twin Gibson L6-S melodies dancing around the Fantom monosynth line.

Technique: Vocals

I don't consider this track to have weird vocals or anything but after listening to it, Eldest Brother asked me what I'd done to my voice. So here's the process:

First, I recorded 6 or 7 takes of the vocals. I use a nice cardoid condenser microphone with a pop screen but no additional FX, accepting the natural reverberation of my studio room.

I cut the tracks into separate clips for each contiguous lyric phrase, and selected the best to construct a single best take for each verse, and two best takes for the choruses. Not surprisingly, usually I ended up selecting from take 2 or take 3.

After assembling the vocal tracks, I use the Tools menu in SONAR to run Adobe Audition 1.5 as an external wave editor, and clean up each clip - removing any obvious spikes and reducing "breath" sounds, not to eliminate but just to reduce them a bit. This step could have been done using a compressor FX during the recording, but I've tried doing that, and I prefer to do it manually. (I probably just don't know what I'm doing with the compressor parameters.)

At this point I cheated very slightly and used a pitch correction tool to fix the worst vocal glitches. It was usually just two or three slightly flat notes per verse. The tool in SONAR is called V-Vocal and although it has an 'auto-tune' mode, I don't use it. I fix the flat notes manually, basically just moving them enough so that you no longer notice the flatness, rather than making them perfect. Subtle is best for this sort of thing. It's easy to inadvertently introduce noticeable pitch artifacts so I always listen carefully to keep it natural.

For the choruses I panned the two takes 25% left and right for a "double-tracked" sound.

The verses are the single take, panned center. I also made a duplicate of the verse vocal track, and applied a "Guitar Amp Distortion" FX plugin to it and reduced the volume, so what you hear in each verse is the natural tone plus just a hint of the distorted version, giving the verses a slight gritty edge.

I have separate busses for the vocal reverb and vocal delay effects, and I use buss send envelopes on the vocal tracks so that I can be precise about what parts of the track have reverb and delay applied. That's why only certain words in the phrase are accented with echo delay, and only certain parts of certain words get reverb'd. The effect is to make the lyric flow and sound good without drowning it.

Finally, and most obviously, in this track I have duplicated certain select phrases from the chorus and placed them into a separate track, using the Pentagon I virtual synth as an FX plugin to get the vocoder effect (the technique is explained here). I've used a custom saw wave patch for this, one with a wide frequency range that works well with the vocoder.

I've been stuck on the drums in Future Imperfect for ages, succeeding only in making tiny incremental advances. Not working.

I'm not a drummer, but when I flail wildly with the sticks on the old rubber pads, sometimes great stuff happens that couldn't have been done on the step programming/pressing the keys on the synth technique. And I'm greedy. I want the coolness, all the way.

But this incremental thing isn't working. There's some drum fills and hihat stuff that I can't do at 135bpm.

Therefore, I'm trying something slightly different. I've copied the entire project's timeline and dropped the time sig to 120 bpm, and I've got a simple guide click track that follows all the 4/4 : 7/8 changes with beat hints, and I've replaced the new bass track (which rocks, by the way, no problem playing that in time) with a cloned MIDI version and dropped that into the new project - instant 120bpm guide bass to play along with (I know, I could stretch the original audio track using tools like Audition or even the built-in tech in SONAR, whatever it's called, to get it to 120bpm, but this quantized MIDI bass track is working better for me, so there.)

If it breaks the block, it'll be worth it.Now I'm trying to record the drums again, but at 120 bpm instead of 135. When I'm done, I'll just copy the MIDI notes back into the original project, and hopefully we'll have an excellent drum track, at the right tempo, that meshes with the existing bass audio and other instruments.